This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Along with the developments of mobile communication technologies and embedded technologies, functions of mobile terminals have become more and more powerful. By means of applications in the mobile terminals, users may browse news, receive and send emails, and chat with other network users, etc. Many applications, such as Instant Messenger (IM) software, online games, and email clients, etc., will not work normally unless identity verification on a server side is verified. Thus, in addition to main functional modules, the application needing identity verification also includes an identity management module which is configured to manage account information and interact with the server side for the identity verification, etc.
In the existing technologies, each of the applications needing identity verification includes a similar identity verification module. Thus, the similar software functions are developed repeatedly, and for the mobile terminal which has much less processing capability and storage capability when compared with a personal computer (PC), many processing capabilities and much more storage space are consumed. Furthermore, an internet corporation usually develops a series of applications for users, and the user may log in to the series of applications by using the same identity (e.g. the same account and the same password). In this case, the user prefers no more operations of identity verification when logging in to other related applications after the previous identity verification is performed at a time. For example, after logging in to a QQ space application by using a QQ account, the user wants to directly log in to a QQ microblog and a QQ mailbox by using the same QQ account without any other identity verifications. Unfortunately, in existing technical solutions, identity information is not shared among various different applications. Each of the applications require the user to perform the identity verification when opening, and thus the same identity is verified multiple times. Accordingly, the user cannot enjoy smooth experiences, and risk of user identity leakage is increased. Moreover, since the same identity information is used by several applications and centralized management cannot be performed, security risk is increased. In addition, if a specific operation (e.g., verification code inputting) needs to be supplemented to the identity verification operation of all applications, each of the applications needs to be configured respectively, which is extremely troublesome and laborious.
In summary, the existing identity management solutions have at least the following deficiencies: software functions are developed repeatedly, user identities are managed separately, the security risk is high and it is difficult to modify configurations.